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This is a patch for the first Argosy mission - Werner von Braun's proposed program to leverage and expand the Apollo technology to send manned missions to Mars starting in the early 1980's. Sadly, due to the politics of the time, it never got much further than the drawing board.

The Argosy missions would have used twin craft on each mission as a safety redundancy. I reasoned that each missions craft would be named after mythical twins - in this case Amphion and Zethus, the twins sons of Zeus and Antiope. The twelve stars represent the twelve man crew. The overall design is a shameless nod to Bob McCall's memorable Apollo 17 mission patch.

I produced this for my buddy Drell-7 who's been modeling and imaging this mission is a series of works in his DA gallery [link] . If you'd like to get full details on the proposed program, check out this great summary from the FALSE STEPS aerospace blog: [link]

That's a great idea, concept and design! Though I think you've used a flag for the German one that isn't appropriate The official German national flag is just these black/red/golden stripes without the eagle. The one with the eagle is only used by associated authorities. So if for instance the BND (the German "CIA"), which is a department of the German government and not of the governments of one of the German states, has an office in one if the states in Germany (Bavaria for instance) it would use the flag with the eagle on that building. If you want to represent "Germany" as a whole you use the flag that only has the stripes, without anything else.

Would that be true for pre-unification West Germany? This mission would have flown in 1981-83. I couldn't quite recall if the flag was different then. I know East Germany had a crest in the middle of theirs.

Well the commercial space program is not really a program.... more just self-contained subcontractors that reduce the engineering load on NASA. It'd be cool if we really did have an "independent program"!

Beautiful work! And I prefer to think of it as a "homage" to Bob McCall. I think he would've approved, with his version ending Apollo, and this one starting the next great exploration into the Solar System. Thank you, sir, for adding to the Argosy series!